Listen to Neil Adams talking about the importance of keeping a training diary and the benefits doing so with Athlete Analyzer Judo. With Athlete Analyzer Judo, coaches can create and share training plans to all their athletes. Whenever they need and wherever they are. It’s easy to adjust the plan when needed for a group of athletes or for an individual athlete. All data can be analyzed at any time by both the coach and the athlete. Neil also talks about the problem regarding over training for some athletes. In Athlete Analyzer Judo there are built in charts covering this in “Training Insights”. Read more about Training Insights here.

If you’re several coaches in your team you can collaborate when managing the plans. One coach can add the judosessions and another coach can add the strength and conditioning sessions. Your physio terapeut can add rehab sessions when needed. Updated training plans are instantly updated in your athletes calendars.

You can read more about training plans in Athlete Analyzer in our help pages

Monitoring the training load of athletes in training and competition is a very hot topic in coaching science right now. With this trend, and with the speed in which new technologies such as ‘wearables’ are being developed it is important we understand the why and the how to measure and optimize these important markers.

Firstly, the why? Research had proven that monitoring training load effectively can help the coach in deciding when to push the athlete harder, and perhaps more importantly when to reign it back (Bourdon et al, 2017). The practice of effective monitoring of training load, allows the coach to make evidence informed decisions. This can significantly decrease the rate of injury and illness. ultimately leading to improved performance through a reduction of ‘lost’ training days throughout the year.

As well as reducing injury and illness occurrences, monitoring training load builds our knowledge on how the athlete’s respond and adapt to the stimulus of training, helps inform the design of future training programs and by individualising the training based on monitoring results, can enhance performance.

Next the how? There are many ways to monitor training load, these can be grouped in two way. Internal load such as blood lactate, heart rate, and rate of perceived exertion (RPE). External load is more objective, such as weight lifted, power output, time-motion analysis and many more. A great monitoring system integrates both elements to provide insight into the status of the athlete.

The two measures we use in conjunction are: Session duration(in minutes), usually this excludes the warm-up and focuses on the specific content of the session, however I prefer to include this time in the total duration figure because we focus the warm-up on developing gymnastic ability, mobility, and general motor performance which ultimately leads to improved performance. Rate of perceived exertion (RPE) refers to how intense the athlete felt the session was (on a scale of 0-10), and by multiplying both numbers together we get the training load(TL) for that session. For example a technical based session may be 120 minutes, with a RPE of 3, which equates to TL = 360. Opposed to a shorter, more intense randori session of 60 mins, at a RPE of 9 TL = 540

In practice this is simple, the coach sets the duration and intensity (RPE) of a session during their planning, and then the athlete enters the data based on their actual training load completed after the training session has taken place (often sooner rather than later). For example, a randori session may be planned for 90 minute and look something like this: –

Once the session is completed, the athlete enters the duration of the session (they may not complete the whole session due to injury, tapering or another reason), followed by their rating of how hard the session was. With the athletes I work with we use the Lego scale (to make it more interesting and give them some context to the numbers). There are lots of resources like this around that give a practical sense of how to use RPE, and by adding descriptions to the rating, it usually makes it easier for the athlete to accurately gauge how hard the session was. Typically we find technical sessions score 4-5 on effort, and randori comes in much higher from 8-10 varying depending on if we are training at home, on a training camp or in a completion phase.

Give access to your plans to the other coaches. Several coaches in your team can help build the same plan. One can plan all the judo training, another all the strength and conditioning and a third all competitions and camps.

Use week planning. Individual training sessions can often be planned on a week level instead of a day level. Doing so means that you no longer have keep track of your athletes’ weakly schedule and the athletes can plan their week according to their own schedule.

No need to plan everything at once. Athlete Analyzer is built for continual planning and any changes you make to a plan will become available for every follower instantaneously. Plan a only few weeks ahead and then continuously add training sessions by time.

Individual planning. Don’t create training plans for single athletes. Instead go directly to their calendar and plan their training. This saves time for both you and the athlete.

As coaches we set goals for our judoka, either instinctively or consciously.

”try to use your ashiwaza in this next randori.”

”first person to score can stay out.”

”you must attack first.”

All coaches will be able to reflect on their own use of such motivational statements, which are actually setting task goals or ego goals for the judoka. Working with more experienced judoka, we often work with them to encourage them to set their own goals for the randori or contest, or competition.

This approach is supported by researchers, for example, Ziv and Lidor in 2013, and Gernigon and colleagues in 2004.

Until now, the available ways that coaches have to measure, record goals and their achievement has been very limited. In the modern world there are plenty of software solutions aimed at supporting the coach, but the unique nature of judo means that technical goals are ignored by most of the options.

Athlete Analyzer Judo, is designed by judo coaches for judo coaches, and provides coaching tools specific to our crazy sport. Like all good coaches, Nicklas and his team are constantly developing, innovating and experimenting with new approaches. The latest innovation, ”Structured Goals”, takes this software onto another level.

”Structured Goals” builds on what the literature tells us about psychology of judoka, and sports performers, and puts it into a judo-specific format that can be used to deliver ”Evidence Based Coaching”. It allows you to measure the effectiveness of your goal setting and impact on the motivation of judoka.